www.affiliateconfession.com

I though Google Adwords had cornered the market on vague and restrictive rules for advertising. Not so. Facebook advertising has turned into a complete joke. Their guidelines mean absolutely nothing, they turn off ads already approved and apparently ad editors arbitrarily disapprove ads for the same reason my cat vomits, that would be for any reason or no reason at all.

Let’s have a look at what a joke Facebook Ads are. Here are 3 ads of mine below that they approved:

Now have a look at 2 ads that they didn’t approve:

Does this make any sense? The first set of ads is a complete goof and the second set is advertising a legitimate product and a legitimate business opp offer without making any ridiculous promises or unrealistic income claims.

But it gets even more unbelievable. The worst part of this whole sideshow is that they must draw numbers out of a hat to decide which Facebook Ad Guidelines they’re going to tell you that you’ve violated as their reason for not letting them run. The ad above about saving 90 cents a gallon on gas is going to this landing page that’s about what else, saving money on gas by using a fuel additive. Yet check out guidelines number 8 and 9 I’ve supposedly run a foul of:

8. Facebook references

Ads are not permitted to mention or refer to Facebook, its site or its brand in any manner, including in the title, body, image, or destination URLs.

Ads must not use Facebook logos, trademarks, or site terminology (including Facebook, The Facebook, FacebookHigh, FBook, FB, Poke, The Wall, and other company graphics, logos, designs, or icons).

Facebook site features may not be emulated.

9. No incentives

No ad may offer incentives to viewers for clicking on the ad, for submitting personal information (cell phone numbers, social security numbers, physical addresses, or email addresses), or for performing any other tasks.

WHAT? (this is when blood squirted out my eyes and across the room) Are there two different sets of guidelines, because what you’re showing me here has no relevance whatsoever to the disapproved ad? Where does my ad say anything about Facebook? Who exactly is running the show at Facebook Ads, and is anyone being trained on how to interpret their advertising guidelines.

Yes, believe it or not, it gets even worse. I’ve been trying to get some understanding on how the Facebook advertising game works by reading NeilsWeb.com and Nickycakes.com and these guys seem to be having some adventures with the gang at Facebook as well, but on a much bigger scale than myself.

Neil logged into his account one day this past week only to see that the ad Nazi’s at Facebook turned off thousands of dollars of previously approved advertising without warning and Nickycakes recently tweeted about a good performing ad he had spent over $100,000 on that was suddenly turned off. Mind you, this is all without warning. One day you’re making the big bucks, and the next day you’re done. No warning, no renegotiating, no fixing the problem and no way to contact the little elves at Facebook Ads, that’s it, we don’t want your money any longer.

Okay, if I’m a VC with money invested in Facebook, I am freaking losing my mind at this point. You did what? You turned off the adverting of a $100K spender without even so much as an email or a phone call? When I worked at BellSouth Advertising we sent advertisers like that to Daytona and gave them box seats, we sent them to Orlando Magic games and they sat in the sky-boxes and got free food, we didn’t rip their $60,000 per month worth of advertising out of the phone book because we changed a policy overnight.

Guys, get a grip on reality, I have patches over my eyes to keep them from hemorrhaging any more.

Update: As I was getting ready to publish, I read this post over at Nickycakes.com on the new guidelines for Facebook Ads and they look even worse that before, but that’s a post for tomorrow or later.

Working with Facebook ads is definitely a challenge, especially in the last few days. What on the surface looks to be easy to get into and easy to use can ultimately be as frustrating as working with nearly any Microsoft product. The problems come from not knowing what the team of editors who approve your ads really want and from the completely arbitrary way they approve ads, also from you not being able to correct disapproved ads (you have to start over with a new ad) and it is also extremely difficult to contact anyone at Facebook to discuss any advertising issue whatsoever.

It’s almost like the team at Facebook wants to be so different in their advertising, they don’t want anyone to advertise, which obviously makes no sense. I get the picture of a bunch of teenagers sitting around at Facebook Ads, playing video games, riding skateboards up the walls turned halfpipe and once in a while approving an ad or two so they can justify their existence. It’s probably not quite like that, but maybe it’s close.

Since it’s a bit frustrating to use Facebook Ads I’ve come up with a few ways to try and deal with them as listed below:

1. Place a pillow firmly over your face and scream “Mustard Mark Zuckerberg” as loud and as fast as you can. This will eventually produce a sound akin to cursing and you may come up with a new term that is one day included in Webster’s. Go ahead, try it.

2. Bang the front of your head directly on a 90 angle of your desk enough times that a ridge begins to form in your forehead. This way when we see each other in public it will be like a little club where we will all be able to recognize and sympathize with each other as Facebook Ads users.

3. If you continually get your ads disapproved try drinking 17 beers, or the equivalent in tequila shots, as quickly as possible to give yourself a completely different writing perspective. Once you change your state of mind, words should begin to flow quite easily and you should be able to write totally different ads, that is if you aren’t spending too much time in the restroom at this point. (lighten up, this is satire)

4. Go to a happy place. Your happy place may be in a straight jacket or in your garden outdoors, where ever it is, make a reservation and check in.

5. If all else fails, use the magic Facebook Ads button. This one has never failed to work. The button is the one in the upper right of your browser and is marked with a red x. Log into Facebook and click it, you can’t miss it.

6. Log into adwords.google.com, start an ad campaign there, earn ridiculous cash  and leave the skateboard riding teens at Facebook Ads to their own vices.

In light of all the issues I’ve had with Facebook Ads I’ll be spending the next few days throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks. I’ll be going down the list at Clickbank and other some ad networks and put up as many ads as I can and work with what’s left after the editors get their say.

I’m sure I’ll have to visit my happy place several times. I already have reservations.

I scored $250 in free Facebook advertising by signing up for the Visa Business Application ($100 free ads credit) and grabbing $150 in coupons from NeilsWeb.com (down at the moment) and while it’s great to get a bunch of free advertising from Facebook, the results are quite underwhelming.

As you can see below here are some results on 5 campaigns I started this week and the best performing one is getting a 0.03% CTR. That means for every 10,000 times the ad is shown I get a whopping 3 clicks. I’m trying to think of a stronger word for abysmal to describe the results, but nothing comes to mind right now.

I’m not the only one experiencing these kind of results with Facebook Ads as is evidenced by doing a simple Google on Facebook ads success. It looks like no one is having that much success at this point and what’s interesting is that these ads were touted to be a new and unique way to advertise on the web and extremely targeted to just the right audience you pick. From reading some of the articles that come up in the above search, it looks like it doesn’t really matter if you “highly target” your campaigns or not, you get the same dismal results. With Microsoft’s investment driving their perceived value up around $15 billion, Facebook is going to have to do better than this for their advertisers.

All is not lost though because the advertising isn’t costing me anything. My next approach is to target ads quite a bit wider and throw massive campaigns in several different niches their way and keep the ones, if any, that are producing. I’ll report back in a week or so to let you know if the results are any better.

I’m curious to know if anyone has had success advertising on Facebook?

A few days ago I posted that Entrecard is now selling credits for $9.50 per 1,000 and suggested a less expensive way of acquiring Entrecard credits through eBay for less than half the price. That post got a couple of interesting comments I though would be worth discussing to see where everyone is with Entrecard advertising and branding.

John from JT Pratt’s Blogging Mistakes commented that rather than spend money on buying Entrecard credits, he would spend that money via Adwords, driving traffic to a niche site and hopefully see a better return on his advertising dollars. This raises a good question on whether Entrecard is a viable advertising medium at all, or if it is just good for getting a little traffic and occasionally meeting other bloggers through dropping your card on their blog.

I have to keep repeating that any way you look at it, advertising on Entrecard is a lot of work. I’ve purchased 25,000 credits or so in the last few weeks, spent about that many and have spent a considerable amount of time looking at blogs to advertise on. And the main problem I see with this method is that, even though I’ve generated some 200 to 250 extra visitors every day, in 8 to 10 days you have to start the process all over again because every bit of your advertising is used up. I think this is the achilles heel of Entrecard. Too much time spent for too little results.

But what about the branding aspect of Entrecard? Over the last 2 weeks or so, more than 300 blogs have displayed and who knows how many thousands of people have seen the AffiliateConfession.com 125 x 125 banner and domain name. So if anything else, the name of this blog is getting in front of more eyeballs on a daily basis.

The sole purpose of buying Entrecard credits for me is to brand Affiliate Confession. That’s where I’m at with this present effort. I’m not really trying to earn money by sending traffic to this blog through Entrecard, my purpose is to get as many people as possible to see the AffiliateConfession.com url and name and get that burned into people’s brains. The money from this blog will come later.

While branding through Entrecard is only one of the channels I’m working through, I don’t honestly know if it is worth it. Marketing your brand is hard to track since there aren’t really any dollars being generated directly from the efforts. I am seeing increased rss subscribers, comments and questions sent through my contact form, but it remains to be seen if this increased activity is due to the time, effort and money spent at Entrecard.

As John suggested, the cost is also an issue. With $100 you can buy roughly 10,000 credits through Entrecard itself or you can buy roughly 25,000 credits through eBay as long as someone is selling them. This is why I suggest going through eBay and saving more than 50%. Alternatively, if you price your keywords right, you may be able to send 500 targeted clicks to a niche site, or even your blog, through Adwords for that $100.

What do you think? If you were in the process of branding yourself, would you rather spend $100 for 10,000 to 25,000 Entrecard credits or spend that money on more targeted clicks from Adwords on something else?

I’ve been doing a lot of advertising through Entrecard lately and have had some pretty good results. As you can see in the image above at the height of my advertising spree after accumulating 30,000 credits, I had 48 ads running at one time. I have also increased my traffic by 200 to 250 visitors a day via ads.

I still think it takes way too much time to find good places to advertise coupled with the fact that your ads only run for 24 hours. It is quite time consuming to maintain a level of running more than 30 ads a day. However, Entrecard has made it easier to visit the blog you are interested in advertising on by being able to go directly to that blog from the category rather than the individual users profile. This saves you a click for each blog you are interested in placing ads with.

Entrecard has also made it easier to get credits because you can now buy them on the site and they are priced at $9.50 per 1,000 credits and sold in bundles of 1,000, 5,000 and 10,000 credits each. So, 10,000 credits will end up costing you $95. It would take you over a month to earn that many credits by dropping the limit of 300 per day. So, in some ways, that is a fairly decent way to spend a little of your advertising dollars.

But it gets even better when you find out you can get Entrecard credits on eBay for less than half of what Entrecard sell them for. I purchased 5,000 for $22 and 10,000 credits for only $40 recently and as I write this post there’s a Buy It Now offer for 10,000 credits for only $30 and there are usually 10 to 12 auctions or sales of Entrecard credits going on at any one time.

Pretty simple math, if you want to do massive advertising with Entrecard and save a bunch of money on the deal, buy Entrecard credits on eBay.